How Tyler Nickel helped Vanderbilt basketball secure crucial road win at No. 11 Texas A&M

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Vanderbilt basketball’s game at Texas A&M had all of the ingredients of several other road losses this season.

A 12-point lead early on that dwindled to just two by halftime. Jaylen Carey and Devin McGlockton in early foul trouble. Then Jason Edwards in foul trouble, too, when he got a technical for protesting his third foul call. Even before that, he hadn’t been having a great game.

But while those issues previously led to losses against the likes of Oklahoma, Florida, Auburn, Tennessee and Kentucky, this time, the Commodores (19-9, 7-8 SEC) managed to dig deep Wednesday and pull out the 86-84 win.

Tyler Nickel was one of the major reasons why. He hit a career-high seven 3-pointers for 21 points total and his plus-11 rating was second on the team only to McGlockton’s plus-14. MJ Collins scored 16 points, going 7-for-11 from the free-throw line.

“It was four bench players and Tyler Nickel,” coach Mark Byington told reporters after the game, referring to the period when McGlockton, Carey and Edwards were in foul trouble. “Tyler Nickel had a great game, but the four guys we had in were actually really good on defense, and so that we were getting stops, we’re getting rebounds, we were making things tough for them.”

Byington won’t complain about how it happened. A Quadrant 1 road win is a Q1 road win, and Vanderbilt has seen so many of those opportunities slip away in recent weeks. The NCAA tournament committee, after all, doesn’t care about style points. On the road at Tennessee, Byington believed the Commodores deserved to win, but they didn’t. In College Station, they found a way.

In the biggest moments, it was seemingly Nickel coming up with a shot every time. During one stretch of the first half, Vanderbilt led 15-14, then Nickel made three triples in 2½ minutes of game time, the third of which gave the Commodores their largest lead of the game at 12.

“The shots he made tonight were really hard, most of them, and he’s a guy, you give him open ones. We run stuff for him. He…

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Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/article/tyler-nickel-helped-vanderbilt-basketball-093908869.html

Author : The Tennessean

Publish date : 2025-02-27 09:39:00

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